


Branches Like Broken Bones

by p1013



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 18:50:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/p1013/pseuds/p1013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He starts running. It’s easy, the slow pound of his feet against hard ground. It’s physical, comforting in its press against his skin, in the ache of his muscles. He gasps for breath, the air tearing into his lungs, escaping in soft explosions against his lips. It quiets the torrent in his mind. His heartbeat is strong and sure, pounding in his ears until it’s all he can hear. It drowns out the screams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Branches Like Broken Bones

Deaton warned them. The darkness starts creeping in almost immediately. Stiles feels it like pins and needles at the ends of his fingers, like fog creeping into the edges of his vision, like dark and hungry eyes on his back when no one else is around. He has nightmares, gut wrenching and overwhelming. There are reaching hands, too thin and marked with scars where the needles went in. He smells antiseptic and blood until he chokes on it. There’s a voice, almost forgotten, that taunts him from the darkness. He wakes up, gasping and crying for his mother, leaving him shaking in the dark, covered in sweat and tears. He can’t breathe sometimes, the blankets crawling up around his neck and suffocating him. In the harsh light of his bedside lamp, he catches himself, reassures himself, but when he turns it off and slips back into dreams, he’s surrounded again, claws and teeth tearing into his flesh, peeling it from his bones to hang in tatters around his trembling hands. He holds his own beating heart, watches as the blood pours out.

He starts to see things when he’s awake, visions and spectres that disappear as he blinks, his eyelids moving so slow, he can feel them brush against the surface of his eyes. Scott doesn’t understand, doesn’t feel it the same way Stiles does. Scott escapes it, focuses on the tangible parts of his life, the things he can control. With the same force of will he used to push through a mountain ash barrier, he grits his teeth and beats it back. Allison shrugs off Stiles’ questions, mouth tight, edges downturned. Her eyes are haunted, but if she sees anything, feels anything, she doesn’t speak of it.

He starts running. It’s easy, the slow pound of his feet against hard ground. It’s physical, comforting in its press against his skin, in the ache of his muscles. He gasps for breath, the air tearing into his lungs, escaping in soft explosions against his lips. It quiets the torrent in his mind. His heartbeat is strong and sure, pounding in his ears until it’s all he can hear. It drowns out the screams.

The Preserve is almost always empty. Fall comes quickly, tearing the leaves from the trees and leaving the forest devoid of color. The path he runs is a dark line in a field of brown, and even when the sun is shining, he’s still lost in an overcast world. The trees whip past him, blurred and constant. He starts to recognize them, oaks and pines and sycamores. Cedar and fir. Redwood. He feels their presence like a comfort, knowing that even in this half-dead world, life still waits to spring forth.

It gives him hope.

The longer he runs, the further he can go. It started with a stumbling mile or two, his body exhausted and broken after little exertion. He could sleep, then. Now, after two months of daily running, he has to go five miles, ten miles, always further until he’s finally able to fall down, body weak and trembling, and sleep without dreams.

The Hale house is an overgrown ruin. There are vines and weeds peaking out from every open door frame and window. Stiles sees shadows moving within, but never finds anything when he investigates. He tries to avoid it, tries to stay away from the memories and ghosts that fill the broken building, but he’s drawn to it. He smells burnt wood and flesh. He hears cries of men, of women, of children, hears the crackle of flesh roasting and splitting open. He searches for Derek, hoping to find someone who might understand the darkness growing within him, but it’s only ever his own voice, his own footsteps, his own heartbeat that echoes back. Sometimes, Stiles thinks he sees him. At the movie theatre, around the edges of the high school. He never finds him. The loft is empty and cold, the For Sale sign hanging forgotten on the front door. There are no calls. No texts. Stiles stops thinking about Derek, stops wondering when he will reappear outside of the misty hallucinations that haunt Stiles’ life.

The forest grows darker every day. Stiles thinks it’s the changing of the seasons, hopes it’s just winter that makes the distance fall away into black uncertainty. The path is familiar, but there is an unknown presence waiting on the edges, flitting into the corners of his eyes. He feels it tickling at the base of his brain, poised. Ready to attack.

He stumbles across the copse of birch one late November evening, shivering and sweating. They peek out from the forest, pale white in the fading light. They stand tall and straight, while the rest of the woods are twisted and dark. They beckon him, urging him to come closer to investigate. Like a curled finger from a delicate hand, like a familiar voice whispering down the halls, like the scent of home after a long trip, they pull him nearer and nearer, his feet moving without thought, without intent. He stops when he stumbles on the edge of the path, the broken ground catching against his sneakers. He takes a slow step back, then another, and then he’s sprinting down the path, the pale trees behind him, waiting.

He starts to see them in his sleep, slender white fingers reaching for him. They creak and groan in winds that leave the other trees frozen and still. They catch against his clothes, against his hair, pulling him in closer and closer until his face is pressed into the dirt between their roots, their flaking bark peeling away beneath his scrabbling fingers. They sneak their way in under his fingernails, tendrils curling over his hands and pushing into his flesh, until his arms are bleached white and flaking. Branches burst forth from his eyes and screaming mouth, until he’s still, part of the forest, forgotten. When he wakes up, he tastes decay in his mouth and pulls leaves from his hair.

He fights the compulsion, tries to stay away from the lone stand, but somehow he ends up lost in the center of the woods, the white trees his only guide from the unknown. Some days, they are innumerable, filling the spaces between the oaks. Some days, there’s only one, a lone shaft of light in the dark. He doesn’t come close, leaves them deep in the woods as he runs past, but they call. They call, they call, they call.

It’s nearly the New Year, the ground covered in hard ice and cold snow. He’s bought special shoes to handle the broken and treacherous ground. He wonders, feet pounding softly against the hard soil, if they will help him elsewhere, keep his footing solid and safe as he makes his way through the halls of the high school or the supermarket or his dreams.

The birch trees are coming closer, he knows that he’s almost there. His heart races, his breath freezes on his lips. He fights the urge to turn, to leave the path. Out of the corner of his eye, against the too-white of the world, of the trees, there’s a dark shape. He turns and stumbles, feet tripping against nothing then finding their familiar rhythm again.

Derek is standing among the trees, legs spread, hands tucked behind his back. He’s wearing his stupid leather jacket, open even in the cold. He’s frowning, of course, brow furrowed, mouth downturned. Stiles blinks, eyelids dragging against the ice building on his eyes, but the dark shape stays.

The trees sway, shaking snow from their branches. They bend and bow and shiver. Twist and roil. Stiles’ feet are still pounding against the ground, the birch trees growing closer and closer. Like skeletal hands, the reach out, wrapping around Derek as he stands, unmoving, in the ankle-deep snow. Stiles looks to the path before him, focuses on the careful crunch of snow and ice beneath his soles. Counts his breaths. In. Out. In. Out. It clouds the air before him, fogging his vision, pricking his eyes. It burns, it burns, but he keeps running.

Stiles hears Derek screaming. It’s broken and unholy, sharp and wet in the silence of the woods. Stiles hears branches cracking, clothes tearing. He hears his name, gurgled from a torn throat. It tears into him like roots, digging under his fingernails and skin, burrowing into his veins and arteries, filling him up until he can’t breathe. He fights past it, counts his breaths, counts his steps, counts his heartbeats to make sure they’re still there. There’s a flash of red in the corner of his eye, and he blinks it away, falling into the familiar dark red behind his eyelids. _In. Out. In. Out._ His heart is pounding, pumping blood through stiff, bloodless fingers. He doesn’t turn from the path, keeps his eyes forward. Eventually, the screaming stops, like it always does. Eventually, Stiles doesn’t smell blood on the wind. Just sweat and snow, ice-cold air in his constricted lungs released on a broken exhale.

In.

Out.

The next day, Scott comes to his house, a torn and bloodied leather jacket clenched in his hand, white and flaking bark caught in the edges. Allison is behind him, eyes dark, skin pale, cheeks sunken like a corpse or a stifled scream.

The jacket is cold and stiff under his fingers, the leather cracked and stained. Red flecks come away, and he tries to brush them off. They stick, staining his hands, staining his bones, staining his soul. Its weight is a heavy recrimination against his palms. Stiles blinks, feels it like sandpaper as his eyelashes fall, but the jacket doesn’t disappear when his eyes open.

Not this time.

**Author's Note:**

> This is set between 3A and 3B, and written between them as well. It's inspired by some of the previews we've been seeing for 3B, as well as my own thoughts on how Stiles is going to handle the darkness that he, Scott, and Allison will have to deal with in the second half of the season.
> 
> Huge thanks to [febricant](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Febricant/pseuds/Febricant) for her help with this. It's entirely outside of my comfort level, so I hope you enjoyed it.


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